Forget My Bar Mitzvah, What About Getting Nuked?

Early on in “This Is Just a Test,” 12-year-old David Da-Wei Horowitz decides that the official “Thing I Am Most Worried About” isn’t trying to talk with Kelli Ann, a girl he has a crush on, or giving his bar mitzvah speech, but the prospect of impending nuclear annihilation. As Madelyn Rosenberg and Wendy Wan-Long Shang recall in a note at the end of their novel (their first together; each has written several others separately), “the specter of a mushroom cloud” loomed over much of the 1980s, when “This Is Just a Test” is set and its authors were in high school. Exacerbating their fears, and those of their protagonist, was the Nov. 20, 1983, broadcast of “The Day After,” a two-hour made-for-TV movie. It tried to portray, with unflinching realism and all the special effects the era could muster, a full-scale nuclear war between the Soviet Union and the United States, as seen through the eyes of several Kansas residents.

Recent tensions with North Korea have perhaps prompted renewed interest in that TV event (neatly captured in an episode of “The Americans” last season). An estimated 100 million Americans tuned in to “The Day After,” many of them gathering in homes, in schools and in churches so as not to have to absorb the film’s implications alone. I was a teenager and watched with several dozen classmates. Afterward we sat in stunned silence or wept quietly as the credits rolled. In the words of one ’80s critic, the movie “achieved the urgency and magnitude of live coverage of a national crisis.”

As Rosenberg and Shang understand, nuclear annihilation is a test to avoid, not cram for and pass. But after watching “The Day After,” David lands on a touchingly ludicrous strategy to address his exploding anxieties: digging a fallout shelter with a new friend, Scott, in the field behind a housing development Scott’s dad owns.

Scott is the kind of popular kid who usually doesn’t pay a shy nerd like David much mind. So David and his best friend, Hector, are thrilled when Scott asks to join their seventh-grade trivia team. This leads to lots of practice sessions, including a game of Trivial Pursuit, a plot development that is clearly aimed at young readers who prefer big books of fun facts to works that examine their emotional wiring. The only problem is that Scott insists they keep their big dig a secret. “I didn’t even invite my own parents,” he confides to David and so wants to exclude Hector and Kelli Ann. David, however, feels guilty about abandoning his best friend to nuclear fallout and doesn’t want to give up on his fantasies of spending some quality time in close quarters with Kelli Ann in doomsday’s aftermath. In his mind, that’s more plausible than working up the courage to talk to her.

At home, he is also contending with two superpowers: his grandmothers. The paternal one is Jewish, the maternal one Chinese, and they are battling for David’s cultural allegiance. The women argue over everything from what food to serve at Thanksgiving to whether Da-Wei will appear as part of David’s name on his bar mitzvah invitation. David just wants to duck and cover.

For a book about the possible end of the world, Rosenberg and Shang keep the tone surprisingly light (though parents should know curious kids can easily find “The Day After,” which remains disturbing viewing, on YouTube). The dialogue is snappy and the plot fast-paced, especially once we begin to worry about the physical survival of one character. The authors touch gently on issues of cultural assimilation. At one point, David becomes so tongue-tied with Kelli Ann, he sees some Christmas decorations and blurts out he’s making a pine-cone wreath. “’Cause we’re Jewish,” his older sister, Lauren, wickedly chimes in. But the book also makes a few odd choices. The authors refer to the grandmother speaking “Chinese” instead of Mandarin. In time, the family’s rabbi senses David’s distress and helps him start to address all his divided loyalties — but not before he risks irreparable damage to at least one cherished relationship.

Throughout, Rosenberg and Shang dot their narrative with proper nouns: Trapper Keepers, Bac-O bits, “Let’s Dance,” Boy George, Atari, “Green Acres,” Walkmen. Many teen films, of course, plumb Boomer or Gen-X nostalgia to attract a broad audience. But “This Is Just a Test” is not a movie or the kind of book parents are likely to read to their kids. So why all the Reagan-era references? The book is itself a kind of game of Trivial Pursuit, and tweens and even teenagers will likely enjoy teasing out historical information, the way David and his friends do in their trivia contests. (Kids who like “South Park,” for example, will recall Cartman’s Dawson’s Creek Trapper Keeper Ultra Keeper Futura S 2000.) Just don’t ask about “parachute pants.” These are best left in time’s unbreachable vault, lest horrific forces of parental embarrassment be unleashed.

Sara Mosle, a schoolteacher for many years, has written about education for The New York Times, The Atlantic, Slate and other publications.